Dell and Compellent are talking about a possible business combination.
The two companies have issued a statement saying that they are engaged in advanced discussions. Dell would acquire all Compellent's outstanding common stock at $27.50/share, meaning about $876m – which will disappoint all the bid-hungry investors gamblers who …

logical move for Dell

I can't see HP bidding

They should be set with 3PAR. However, Dell wisely (and obviously) sees Compellent as the best-of-the-rest. Pillar isn't going anywhere except maybe straight into Oracle. Xiotech would've been good to buy 5 or more years ago.

Who else would bid for Compellent besides Dell? They might be able to get it for a good bargain.

Good move

Dell and Compellent could be a winner - EqualLogic is doing great under the same operating model, targeting a different market. I could see a Dell:Compellent branding in the future, and the technology being built out for large enterprise use.

As for HP, the Compellent offering doesn't quite match 3PAR so it would be an expensive undertaking with no real advantage, and we all know that HP would just swallow the product and the bare minimum people it needs to keep developing the technology.

I still don't get it...

...what is so (excuse me for the pun) compelling here for Dell that would warrant this much money?

"It has many features of enterprise arrays, particularly its automated block-level data movement between tiers of storage including both solid state and hard disk drives. It is also very well-integrated with VMware and has FCoE support."

EQL has auto-tiering at block-level already. EQL is very well integrated with VMware and FCoE is probably the least interesting protocol out there, let alone it shouldn't take too long to support it for EQL if it would be something clients would use.

EQL does not support FC, that's all I can come up but it was always a scale-out SCSI box and Dell sells servers so you can get your FC hook up there.

It must be software, something in the new Storage Center that gives Dell such a hard-on they consider so much money...

...but you forgot to explain, just linked some older, not too well-written rundown of yours.

You call it a Clariion-replacement right after you admit it's not enterprise-level at all - huh...?

This article does not really make too much sense, no valid argument so far and the whole piece was obviously written hastily, just to be the first one out there, I think.

Not getting it ...

This might help - Dell. Think how it could replace margin dollars lost to EMC for resold CLARiiON and Celerra systems with an in-house Compellent operation. Think how it could operate Compellent remotely as it has EqualLogic. Think how Dell must admire Compellent's stripped down and lean supply chain and channel-only approach. There's a real good fit there, at least you could persuade yourself there is.

Market generally sees iSCSI as low-end SAN and FC (FCoE in future) as high-end SAN. Compellent brings FC SAN to Dell. Ask yourself why Dell is rejecting forthcoming EMC CLARiiON/Celera combo in favour of Compellent. Ask yourself what is all the extra processing HW in Storage Center's latest release going to do in future?

"Compellent's latest controllers are over-powered for their work and form the basis for a series of developments to help it to scale out its storage more and improve its efficiency."

It's less about revenue than margin

Chris, regarding your statement: "...Dell's failure to generate significant revenue from its co-branded EMC CLARiiON block-access arrays..." I suspect this is more about margin than revenue. At one time Dell was a significant portion of EMC CLARiiON revenue, but they derive better margins from the Equallogic products. The acquisition of Compellent will give them the ability to capture more margin in larger enterprises.